War on Piracy and Faked Figures

Have you ever wondered where the MPAA and RIAA get their numbers for lost jobs due to piracy? Lost income? I ran across an interesting article written by Julian Sanchez who went looking for these answers in his in-depth article.

In short, the numbers quoted are often extremely bad 20+ year old guesstimates from poorly done studies using limited questionnaires sent out to businesses, passed around from agency to article, each quoting or misquoting their source, and sometimes not even quoting at all. It all comes down to childish games, pure and simple. Especially when you consider the following...

Neither figure is terribly plausible on its face. As Wired noted earlier this week, 750,000 jobs is fully 8 percent of the current number of unemployed in the United States. And $250 billion is more than the combined 2005 gross domestic revenues of the movie, music, software, and video game industries.

It boggles the mind. Seriously though, read the article for the big picture. It'll make you want to trout-slap quite a few people in govt. as well as IP industry.